To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.

The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.

I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.

One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.

Thanks for the nostalgia. Haven’t seen the LHA file format in the wild for years!

Completely agree. We have an issue logged for this already, should have a fix soon. Probably a checkbox in the user settings to allow small click targets or not in list view.

Try tap holding on the comment header to show the action bar. This should be fixed in the next version, between a few of us making PRs to streamline comment collapsing and hiding the comment action bar, we accidentally messed up the UI for the inbox and profile views a little bit.

Wow, they’re really shitting the bed aren’t they?

r/Australia made a half-arsed “we support the movement, but we’re not going dark” post which was met with much ridicule from the community as “pissweak” and “a very Australian response, like our climate change policy”.

I’m actually curious to see how well GPT-4 could handle translations. Particularly because each translatable string has an identifier key in camel case English which gives clues about the context of the line to the translator, so I suspect it would do quite well compared to a naive “Google Translate all the strings” approach.

I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we’ll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it’s in the hands of the community.